Actually, I talk too much

I occasionally am ribbed for not being very talkative.

I suppose that's true, but barely a day goes by that I don't say something I instantly wish I hadn't said. Right now I can think of two or three occasions in the past ten days where I said something that would have been better left unspoken.

I don't have much of any usefulness or importance to say (neither do most of us, if the truth be known), and if I could limit my speech to the things that were of real value, I'd speak maybe once every two days. (See what meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein said on this same subject.)

Sometimes at one of my local hangouts, a friend will come up and sit down, say "Hi," and nothing else. I'll say "Hi" in response and then we'll sit there silently. I'm OK with this. We each realize (I hope) that we can be friends in each other's company without filling the air with mindless jabber.

I have a few friends who have attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Texas. I wonder how I would survive that. I also remember the actor Larry Hagman's habit of setting aside one day a week in which he never spoke. That seemed eccentric when I first read of it twenty-five or so years ago, but it seems rather sensible today.